Cryptfiend, given your early advanced state of research, you never should have let me steal the Death-mage mercenaries I did. I can't imagine you didn't have access to Twiceborn by the time I bought that first one out from under you, and I'm fairly certain you came to regret letting me pick up Urkivel and his vaetti given what I ended up doing with reliable Death access. Twiceborn letting you keep mercs after they die once would be strong enough, but given that you get to keep them AND their troops if you promise the still-living boss eternal life, hiring a living Death mage and not immediately Twiceborning them just seems like a grievous error. I focused my research directly towards Ech4 after I suicided that first necromancer so any more Death mercs would be permanent acquisitions, and given how low the bar is to break into Death, that investment paid off enormously. I just wish I'd've been able to afford empowering my subverted troll shaman with Earth so I could have started cranking out Shademail to overcome the fatal lack of stealth on my elven riders. Enh, the RNG giveth and taketh away, and this game it definitely didn't want to giveth me a worthwhile Earth income. Them's the breaks.
So, couple of things here. First, I got a event spawned necromancer early on so I didn't need death mercenaries to break into death so keeping them was a low priority, I should have suicided him into a throne though just to deny others yes (although that would have cost me a round of income). And I didn't have enchantment 4 at that point (I got it a couple of turns after you stole the troll mercenary) Making Malikah into light SCs at that point was my goal and that took my research priorities in other directions (which worked out, I killed C'tis almost entirely with 4 Malikah and Abyssia stopped attacking me after I killed one of his armies with one Malikah.) A big thing that informed my research priories is I had a hell blessed Abyssia as a neighbor and flaming arrows is totally useless against them. So enchantment was really kneecapped compared to normal early priorities.
Also to be honest, I feel like he did almost nothing for you?
5-6 bane venom charms. Do you know how many people died of plague in my army?
1 person.
And all my important mages I had cast Pyre of Catharsis after I killed your plague scouts, which, I guess is sorta annoying and expensive but less expensive then the death gems you put into the bane venom charms. Also of course all the foot soldiers were doomed (don't care about them, it's for the best tbh) and maybe some people died in fights from having low hp. But bane venom charms aren't a "I'm going to win this war." expense. They are either a you're loosing the war and want to weaken your enemy in the pretty far future or you just want to be a completely asymmetric asshole. If you want to win a war you're actually fighting you can't maybe have a chance to kill a mage 20 turns in the future, you gota kill them before they take 3 of your forts and kill a bunch of your stuff.
Lord, did I dislike this non-wraparound map. With toroidal worlds, you can always find >some< way to check any player's progress, or threaten most thrones. Here, I saw where I was on turn 1, and pretty much resigned myself to being passive.
I mean, in some way, being in the boondocks like that helped me stay in the game this long, seeing how I had no good strategy for how to play Phlegra (and had I been invaded by one of the more focused nations I'd probably just fold). But having no options (or threats, or little reason for diplomacy) was no fun overall.
Yeah honestly Valanis is a terrible map
. The lack of ability for distant people to interact with each other is one of the reasons. Combine that with the terrible cave and water system too and it's probably from a game play perspective one of the worst maps I've played on. Still, it's sometimes fun to play bad maps. I had fun overall, although fighting a underwater nation as a land nation is a highly not fun experience, probably over all the worst issue dominions has imo. But that's why I did it, once I realized that there was a bit of a gap in the game between my position and the others I took it upon myself so the rest of you could focus on each other and not worry about Ys
Edit: Also yeah, the people in the north had a very rough situation with the throne positions.
Edit 2: I'm sure no one else will find this interesting, but my capital this game had (as of the last turn) an income of 873 gold per turn. Which is I think the highest single province income I've ever seen. Certainly is on turn 56
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Topic: Dominions 5 Round 05 - Finished, Na'Ba victorious (Read 33670 times)